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Novella Cascarella knows, of course, that her big sister is 50-plus years in her grave in Arcadia, some 3,000 miles away. Her Tilly will forever be 24.

Yet the decades have rolled on for the little sister, now in her 70s, who never forgot, not for a day.

Sometimes the remembering of the deaths of her sister, Christine "Tilly" Walker, her husband, Cliff, and their two children, took Novella to dark places and made life not only a scary proposition but a chore to drag herself through.

"I think the word 'closure' should be abolished from the English language," Novella says. "There is no such thing."

She was a 20-year-old living in Port St. Lucie in 1959 when an aunt called to break the news so utterly grotesque and irreversible: Tilly, Cliff, Jimmie and Debbie were found dead, shot in cold blood in their home — Tilly raped, the little girl drowned in the bathtub.

Her Mama, God bless her, was ironing in her kitchen all by herself when she heard about it on the radio. Come home now, Novella. Nobody knows who did it.

But, oh, would people ever come up with ideas about that.

"I was hysterical," Novella recalls, from her home far north in the narrowest part of Idaho, a place she found years ago by closing her eyes and letting her finger drop on a map. Any place but that wretched Florida would do, she vowed.

The slaying in Osprey was a wrenching tragedy for the Myers, Christine's extended family, but far from a private one.

The unsolved Walker case is making news yet again.

Family members have waited months to find out if a once-discounted theory about who killed their loved ones is valid after all.

Last December, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, two of the most notorious and reviled killers of the 20th century, were exhumed from their paupers' graves in Kansas so DNA could be harvested from their bones.

Hickock and Smith, the subjects of the popular novel "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote and a movie by the same name, were hiding out in Florida when the Walkers were slain.

Circumstantial evidence, coincidences, eyewitness accounts were tantalizing, but nothing definitively linked them to the family's deaths.

But if the DNA collected from their bodies is viable, and it matches evidence from the murder scene, the slaying of the Walker family — Cliff, 25, Christine, 24, Jimmie, 3, and Debbie, 1, will be solved.

Results are expected any day.

Haunted memories

For Novella, whatever the DNA lab finally reports does not matter a whit.

Now, after learning from cold-case detectives at the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office about all the links between her family and the two killers, she is convinced Hickock and Smith did it. Not a Walker family member. Not a former friend. Most of all, not a jilted lover.

Family members still spit fire over the oft-spouted theory that Christine committed adultery with a boyfriend, who then killed everyone in a jealous rage. Townspeople at the time gossiped to police about how she was love-starved and liked to flaunt her figure.

"She was attractive and she was raped, and people back then — and sometimes now — still think women ask for it," says Pat Myers, Christine's half-brother. "Everybody wanted to blame her."

Pat, 62, owner of Pat's Bar-B-Que in Lake Placid, less than an hour's drive east from Arcadia, was 8 when Christine died in the couple's remote Osprey house. As a child, he used to spend a week now and again with his big sister and her husband.

"I never saw them fight," he says, of Christine and Cliff, a poorly paid cowboy who worked hard on someone else's cattle ranch. "Oh, you know, they would fuss like any married people do, but that was it."

His voice catches when he thinks of her and he blinks back tears. It's wrong how she has been maligned all these years. It's just plain wrong.

'A crack in the slab'

Wendi Cascarella, Novella's daughter and Christine's niece, was not even born when the family was killed.

It does not matter. The seeping of misery from that day tainted her childhood and haunts her as an adult.

As a child, she used to spy on conversations by her mother and grandmother, the ones that stopped abruptly when she or her sister entered the room.

"As kids we were dragged to the cemetery," Wendi says, from her home in Tennessee. "I'd look at these graves — Christine, Cliff, Jimmie and Debbie Walker. Who were these people? Why did they all die on the same day?"

Then, while snooping, she found a "True Detective" magazine hidden in her mother's night stand, with eight pages of graphic crime scene photos and breathless prose about the case.

It explained why every year, from November to January, her mother became moody, sad and withdrawn. Christine was born in November and died on Dec. 19. The family was buried on Christmas Eve.

"She tried to make Christmas nice, but we could always tell something was wrong," Wendi, 48, recalls.

When Wendi was about 13, her grandmother Ruby — Christine and Novella's mother — told Wendi a macabre tale that slithered into her psyche for good.

"She told me that when my mom got pregnant with me, she went to Christine's grave and told her about it," Wendi recalls. "When I was born, my grandmother went back to the grave and there was a crack in the slab."

That led the old woman to believe part of Christine's soul traveled into Wendi at her birth.

"Everybody thought I was so much like Christine. She was so sweet and giving, I felt I had to live up to her," Wendi says. "I didn't want to destroy her memory for them.

"Can you imagine what it's like to compete with a ghost?"

Since then, she, too, feels Christine lives on in her and watches over her.

Wendi went into law enforcement, where she had access to police records on the case.

"Hickock and Smith did it! I know it!" she says. "Cops have a gut feeling. I know it in my heart of hearts. The DNA is just crossing the t's and dotting the i's."

Wendi, too, is ready for Christine's name to be free of the insinuations and slurs.

"All you ever hear about is the Walker family. Everybody in my family says the same thing: She was a Myers before she was ever a Walker."

Tight bonds

Christine's sister Novella usually declines to speak to outsiders about the slaying. But the time has come to tell people who Tilly really was, she says.

"Everybody said she was a whore," Novella recalls. "If nothing else, I want people to know she was a clean, sweet, kind-hearted girl."

If she invited Hickock and Smith into her home, it was probably because their mother had taught them to be friendly, smile and say hello to everyone they met.

Their mother also invited people into their Arcadia home, feeding strangers who had fallen on hard times during the Great Depression.

She says she and her dear Tilly were confidantes who grew up playing barefoot and poor in the scrubby, wide open fields of Arcadia.

The two wove in and out of trouble with their Mama as girls, swinging from the tops of Australian pines as make-believe circus performers, or taunting a bull on somebody else's property. Christine, skilled with a cow whip, kept the bull at bay while Novella rolled under the fence to safety.

"She was always protecting me," says Novella. "We didn't have two nickels to rub together, but we had fun anyway."

The two girls, whose father had left home, assembled orange crates after school to help supplement their mother's meager income doing other people's laundry on an old washboard.

They hammered slats together, building the boxes to hold orange candy to sell to tourists. Nothing to do but talk and share their dreams of getting married to a handsome man someday, maybe a cowboy.

On some nights, they sneaked out their bedroom window into the yard, where they giggled and ran around in the moonlight. Christine taught Novella how to jitterbug to music on an old Victrola they once found in someone's garbage.

In her teen years, Christine began to fill out in a way that vexed her little sister, who was four years younger. Christine got Novella a job with her at McCrory's five and dime for spending money.

"Tilly had to get a cap on one of her front teeth in high school and it just had to be gold," Novella says with a laugh. "Then she was stuck with it. I never knew why she thought she had to get that gold tooth."

If the budding young woman sometimes wore shorts and a Marilyn Monroe-style sweater that showed a little bare shoulder, Christine was just one more pretty girl growing up in the 1950s. Theirs was a fast-changing world that sometimes frightened their elders, even in tiny nowheresville Arcadia.

Elvis' hips swiveled, Bill Haley exhorted teenagers to rock around the clock, and Novella and Christine loved to pile into a car full of other high school girls to head to Kock's, the local soda shop.

"Tilly was built like a brick you-know-what," Novella laughs. "She was a blonde, too — sometimes."

Christine, who taught herself to twirl with a broomstick, loved to take the lead of the DeSoto High School marching band as head majorette, tossing her baton "up into the heavens," says Novella, who played the clarinet — poorly. Once Christine dropped it, clobbering some poor band member in the head.

The two girls performed at football games and marched down main street in the parades that still characterize this historic Central Florida town.

'Going downhill'

Where Christine met Cliff is a piece of information likely buried with them.

It might have been in the high school they both attended, or perhaps in the omnipresent rodeos where she twirled rope and he roped calves.

When Tilly was ready to marry Cliff, she insisted Novella get married, too, in a double ceremony. Christina was 20, Novella 16.

Novella barely recalls the Christmas Eve funeral just four years later, with its four caskets, two of them so tiny. She could not bring herself to look at her sister in her coffin.

Whole segments of that day have simply disappeared from her mind.

"I think that's a blessing," she says.

For decades, Novella attempted to live as if this horrific thing had never happened. She divorced her first husband and moved to New York, where she worked as a model.

But wherever she ran, even as far away from Arcadia as Rathdrum, Idaho, she had to keep the curtains drawn and the shades pulled. If not, her anxiety about strangers coming into her house overwhelmed her. She couldn't answer her door. Her depression — "going downhill," she calls it — made those last months of every year torture, layered with guilt when she felt she had ruined Christmas for her own children.

A few months ago, when she first heard that DNA might put the evil rumors to rest once and for all, vindicating her sister, she suffered what family members call a nervous breakdown.

"I realize I had tried to compartmentalize everything," Novella says. "I was like the little boy with that finger in the dam. It all came flooding out and I went berserk."

That was scary, but in some ways liberating.

Last Christmas was the best one ever; that downhill slide didn't happen. Everyone in the family noticed how much better she seemed.

Yes, she still misses Tilly. She always will. At each stage of her life — when babies were born, when parents died, when husbands vexed — she missed being able to call up the one person who, no doubt, would understand.

Now, she so wishes Christine were an old lady, too, so the two of them could share memories about making Easter baskets at the five and dime or that scary bull or their loving Mama.

Christine Walker rests far away in that quiet cemetery, her husband and her children by her side forever. But now, Novella can rejoice that Christine's good name is all but cleared. She knows it's also OK to bring Tilly out of that mental compartment where she was hidden for so long.

Now, a smiling, laughing Tilly is free to jitterbug across little Vella's memories as her open curtains let in the sun.

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